Intel has just announced its new line of processors, called Ivy Bridge, which uses a new type of transistor to reach the 22nm production process as well as maintain Moore's Law. They call it the 3D transistor, and in all honesty, this stuff goes way over my head. Even the incredibly cheesy n00b-video from Intel doesn't really make any lightbulbs appear in my head. So...

I think I've read somewhere that the difference in power-performance ratio between Atom chips and ARM ones is no longer something like an order of magnitude, but more like a factor of two or three. If Intel have gone this far, they can easily go ahead and reach parity with ARM, which would be an amazing achievement considering the difference in complexity between the crowded x86 world and ARM's "cars with no standard steering wheel" approach.

The power draw issue has lot more to with the complete package than merely the CPUs. The current Atom SoCs from Intel depend on a multichip design. In the case of ARM you could get designs that have everything in one chip (with wifi, gsm, AV, etc) with a significantly smaller power draw. Furthermore, I've yet to see Atom designs with comparable GPU power found in the recent ARM SoCs.

The power draw issue has lot more to with the complete package than merely the CPUs. The current Atom SoCs from Intel depend on a multichip design. In the case of ARM you could get designs that have everything in one chip (with wifi, gsm, AV, etc) with a significantly smaller power draw. Furthermore, I've yet to see Atom designs with comparable GPU power found in the recent ARM SoCs.

About GPU power, I won't argue, though as Intel GPUs have significantly improved on the desktop area with Sandy Bridge & Ivy Bridge, we can probably expect the next Atom to perform better in this area too.